Our Latest Posts About: Kindle

Wouldn't it be great if you could read books in bed... hands free?

The idea is simple. Anyone who loves to read books in bed knows you've got to make some trade-offs. You can't lay flat, because you can't see the book unless you hold it up the whole time, and that's way too uncomfortable because the blood rushes down your arms. If you sit up, it's easier to hold the book, but you're not as comfortable as you would be if you could lay flat.

The simple solution is a book projector that projects your book on the ceiling, so that you can lay flat on your bed and not have to hold your book above your head. There are some details that would need to be worked out, like a way to change pages by clicking a remote, snapping your fingers or using voice commands, but essentially it's... [More]

We need App Store freedom!

Greed is holding the computer industry. If the future of computing is in mobile devices and tablets, we need better cooperation between device manufacturers so that popular Apps work on every platform. As things stand now, you can't run a lot of the most popular iOS Apps on the Amazon Kindle Fire, and that's a shame.

Amazon blocks Apps from just about any company that competes with them. That's why you won't find third-party apps for books, music, or movies, including Barnes and Noble's Nook, or the Google Play Store. As a matter of fact, they even block third party browsers like FireFox and Google Chrome because they want to monitor and control all your web searches.

This problem isn't limited to Amazon's Kindle Fire. Apple has similar restr... [More]

I wish the Kindle PaperWhite had a stylus so it can be used as a notepad / sketchbook.

There's something special about the Kindle PaperWhite. Unlike most tablets and mobile screen, you can read it outside without any glare, and the display looks and feels just like paper.

Now that the newest generations also feature a touch screen display, I think the next logical progression is to add the ability to write directly on the screen, preferably with a stylus. I've skipped a few minor upgrades over the past few years, but if they introduced a version with this feature, I'd definitely upgrade.

For some reason, Amazon decided to eliminate Audiobook support in the black and white Kindle models.

When the first Amazon Kindle was introduced, it had a black and white screen, and it had an audio jack to plug in a headset to listen to books using a crude text-to-speech computer voice. The feature wasn't particularly popular, and some book publishers didn't allow Amazon to support text-to-speech because they felt it would hurt their audiobook sales.

As an audiobook fan, I can understand the publisher's point of view, because a computer voice is no substitute for a good narrator. I can't even imagine listening to an entire book read by a monotone computer voice. Simply stated, if you want your books read to you, get an audiobook version, read by a real person.

The Amazon Kindle PaperWhite has a touch screen... so why not give people a way to use it to doodle or take notes?

The best thing about the Kindle PaperWhite is that the screen looks and feels like paper. Unless you use a magnifying glass, it's hard to to tell what you're reading wasn't printed on paper.

Because it's designed specifically for reading books, Amazon didn't put many other features into it, which is a shame because the the PaperWhite's e-ink touch screen would make a perfect writing surface too, especially with a good stylus.

Unlike some electronic doodling boards such as the Boogie Board, which can't save your notes, notes and sketches saved on the Kindle would could easily be placed inside an Electronic Notebook / Sketchbook or even saved to your local PC or... [More]

It was a mistake buying my Kindle PaperWhite at a slightly lower price, allowing Amazon to place advertising on the device.

Amazon sells two versions of each Kindle model. One version costs $20 less, because it has "Special Offers", which are advertisements in places that Amazon claims won't get in the way of reading your books.

The second version costs a few dollar more, but it has no such advertising. They call it a discount for allowing the ads. I call it an extra fee to get rid of them.

I'm a big fan of coupons, so when Amazon announced they would put Special Offers on the Kindle, I assumed that meant "insider coupons", special deals that only the savvy people who opted-in would get. Why wouldn't I want that? Any time somebody... [More]

* Note: The ideas on "Idea of the Day" were posted without any formal research into existing inventions.

In some cases, patents may already exist for these ideas, in other cases, there may not be any existing patents and you are free to develop and explore the viability of developing and patenting the ideas.

The authors make no claim that any of the ideas are safe, practical, or suitable for any particular purpose. You are responsible for the results of trying, developing, patenting or using any of the ideas on this site.

For some people, our ideas are just an interesting read, but our goal is to encourage you to take action. If you see an idea that you like, do something with it... Take action.